only the weed is being RE-criminalised in the coming months and so is that delightful piece of legislation that allows police to stop and search without ANY probable cause in designated "hot spots" to be determined at their will without any notice. Things got fucked up real quick over here...

No, they have stated that they will be targeting P2P traffic including torrents. I sent an email to the minister asking if legitimate uses of torrent would also be banned (ie open source) and have never received a response.

As much as everyone will hate hearing this, it really isn't. I'll preface this post by saying, as an Australian resident, I am staunchly against any form of censoring, but I am here playing devils advocate.

Every country has laws, and the Internet is unique in that it has the ability to cross borders without regard to whether laws are permissive or not. Imagine the Internet as a series of tubes which can transfer physical objects over state borders. People could order Narcotics, Pharmaceuticals, weapons, and any other number of things prohibited in their country. The actual Internet is much the same except it transfers digital content, but much like the aforementioned contraband, the digital content is also subject to laws.

We're not just talking about CP here, we're talking about 2girls1cup and golden shower porn, which falls under objectionable content in Australia. We're also probably talking about gore/shock sites. Also movies and games which have been refused classification.

Basically they are just trying to make the Internet a more "legal" place rather than the Wild West it currently is. What we, as Internet users, are saying is that we are all badass cowboys who like the wild west, and we don't want some government coming in with the law and ruining all the fun.

Despite all this, however, the Internet is unique in another way: it will be entirely impossible to block the content they are trying to keep out. Even if they were somehow able to list all the sites/torrents/nzbs/newsgroups/etc with prohibited content, you would still be able to access it via proxy, or by TOR, and that is precisely how people access CP and other prohibited content now anyway so their plan will be zero impact on that.

So, in summation, the censorship plan does make sense, and it is very forward thinking, but only if you are a 60 year old politician whose exposure to the Internet is limited to Outlook Web Access and the office Intranet Site.

edit: Downvotes? Guys, I'm agreeing with you! I'm explaining the reasoning behind the madness, while still concluding that it's madness!

However, in addition to being impractical and impossible to reliably implement, as you point out (I believe Conroy's quoted saying it works "100%" -- hah), such a plan

sets a dangerous precedent (who defines "objectionable"?)

doesn't address the problem of getting bad things (narcotics/pharmaceuticals/etc. are physical items that can harm someone, and are stopped by physical means, which are then circumvented through more covert channels -- kiddie porn is exactly the same thing)

I don't care what anyone says, words don't hurt. Nor do pictures. And as reprehensible as kiddie/snuff porn is, think of the means of getting rid of it through censorship as analogous to reducing muggings by enforcing a curfew

I can't comment on Australia's laws, as I do not live or vote there; what democratically elected politicians do in Australia is the business of Australian citizens. However, this is only true to a point; as a stable member of the international community with some standing, Australia has the ability to introduce some pretty scary ideas to my own politicians ("look! It works in Australia!") and that's something I would like to avoid entirely.

Don't be a drama queen. It is defined by the classification board which is an independent body of unelected, apolitical public servants as per the westminster system. The problem is the regulations they enforce are beyond belief.

I don't believe that gay marriage is a slippery slope to interspecies marriage, but I do believe internet regulation is a slippery slope to more internet regulation. This needs to be fought, kicking and screaming.

edit: Downvotes? Guys, I'm agreeing with you! I'm explaining the reasoning behind the madness, while still concluding that it's madness!

I upvoted you before you added that, when you were at -8. Now you're +8. It's a little disturbing the groupthink is that strong. "Here are some possible arguments from the other side." "BOOOOOO." "Wait, I forgot to emphasize that these are stupid arguments I don't personally agree with." "YAAAAAAY."

Insightful comment, I commend it. What I see here is finally the issue of our draconian digital content restrictions coming into the spotlight. It is insane that 18+ material is refused classification if it is a video game, and now an internet site, and that is at the core of the issue. Painting this whole situation as a freedom of speech issue will not help to win the argument, the argument should be that the majority of gamers are over 25, and the majority of people do not consider pornography to be particularly bad.

"Including filtering information that can be used to commit crimes." Who will define and classify information that could be 'potentially' used to commit crime? How about information on poisonous plants? Ooops, there goes the castor bean. Sorry, no rhubarb, its leaves have oxalic acid. There goes chemistry information, can't have data about chlorine gas, no weapons information, and then no use of machine tools. No programming information because it might be used to write hacking software or pirate movies, and last but not least, we can't have data on photography because terrorists take pictures of public buildings.

It's already happened. The most ridiculous "accident" was a dentist's business site. Now the country is protected against clean teeth and fillings! Maybe he was banging the wife of whoever was in charge of making up the list?

Yes. He was blocked for years and only found out because Wikileaks published the Aussie government's top-secret ban list.

But I have complete faith that a government unable to keep their website up long enough for anyone to read a press release is completely capable of designing a filter that everyone with a thimbleful of technical knowledge says is unworkable.

It doesn't. Some of it's up there on html, but there are loads of pdfs and docs on issues such as drug manufacture or lockpicking that are found through newsgroups and private download and P2P networks.

When I lived in the Middle East and I needed something that was blocked (either before I got a VPN, or if my VPN was playing up) I would just email a friend overseas the link, or message it to them via MSN, and have them email me over a paste or a pdf of the info.

I love looking up stuff on weapons of all kinds. I don't make or use them, but I like reading about them. I also have a hobby of lockpicking. I don't do anything illegal, but buying and picking personal locks is fun to me. Another thing I like to do is read up on drugs, yet I don't make or do drugs either. I have a mind which enjoys knowledge. My life in Australia would suck right now. I'm glad I don't live there.

I've never been interested in CP. Although, I've watched bestiality out of curiosity. I once saw a woman get plowed by a horse. That was intriguing to say the least. When the horse was finished, you heard a big 'splash' as its semen fell out onto the floor. Another time I saw a woman take a great dane's knot. That was pretty amazing.

On a side note, what about on the second date? haha Is that a good time to discuss my study hobbies?

No, no, no. Don't throw away your vote - that genuinely is a waste. Find a candidate that more closely supports your views - vote pirate party, or the anarchists, or anything. The only people a donkey vote helps are the major party candidates.

1) A blacklist can be blocked with 100% accuracy minimal performance hit.
2) A blacklist can be trivially circumvented
3) More elaborate filters can get hits rates around 80% for Bad Stuff (tm)
4) The elaborate filters have false positives of between 2-4% (which is a LOT!)
5) The elaborate filters have performance hits from negligible through
to serious
6) The elaborate filters can be circumvented with ease inversely
proportional to the slow down. i.e a faster filter will be easily
circumvented, a slow filter will be hard to circumvent.

So it looks like the government wants to go with the blacklist option,
despite the fact that a) it'll cost a buttload to implement and will
b) be easily circumvented by those want to.

The testing document also doesn't discuss the policies required to
keep the blacklist valid, but we've seen from the ACMA list leak that
blacklists can get ugly quickly.

cite:(this comment was originally written by Tim in a mailing list I belong to)

4) The elaborate filters have false positives of between 2-4% (which is a LOT!)

Yes. It doesn't sound much, but think it through. Suppose this filter misfires 2-4% of the time. Call it 3%. Then that means that about one page in 33 that you try to visit will be incorrectly blocked. That's huge. Since the number of perfectly legitimate website hits dwarfs the number of illegal ones, that means that the vast majority of blocking events will be false positives.

Imagine a magical terrorist filter at the airport which detects 99.9% of all terrorists, but with a 3% false positive rate. Imagine the great crowds of innocent travellers taken to one side and anal-probed - because the 99.9% accurate terrorist detector picked them out at that 3% rate.

The Australian Sex Party is also worth considering. They stood in both seats in the recent by-election, garnering some 3.3% of the vote in each. Their platform is socially progressive and strongly anti-censorship.

No way in hell now that Turnbull got rolled and "Padre" Abbot is in the driver's seat. Abbot would love to have the internet censored.
But then again, is there really a problem? The intelligent will simply VPN (or whatever) their way around the censorship, while the ignorant will be protected from seeing scary stuff that might freak them out. I for one will enjoy 4chan a lot more once "Ausfag hour" is put an end to.

If you're like 99% of other internet users, your "fight" will involve three (3) posters printed on your inkjet printer, using the word FUCK, taped on nearby lampposts before going home to smoke pot/play video games/stroke it.

...It fucking infuriates me that the leaders of the two biggest political parties in this otherwise great country are among the most clueless fucking morons imaginable on issues that seriously affect us.

Still waiting for Tony Abbott to contribute something coherent to the whole climate change discussion.

It's because the only sort of people that tend to go into politics these days are (mainly) beta males with extensive hang ups and ego issues.

Anyone with talent or brains goes into business (or arts or science), excels in that field and gets rich if they want to.

Only failures and those with chips on their shoulders tend to enter politics. The actual "vocation" politicians with talent, wisdom and personality are a rare phenomenon these days. Bob Brown maybe? I can't think of many others. Calibre-wise they're generally the lowest of the low among the educated sector of society.

I believe Australia is a test-bed. That the rest of the developed world are watching this very closely.

I believe that they will be looking very closely regarding this filter's deployment; how well it can be modified on the fly, and how quickly the public backlash can either be suppressed or just fades away.

Next stop for the filter will be Britain, Europe and the US - there is no way in hell that these guys will just sit back and watch while Australia 'successfully' (how this success is defined is highly subjective, as we all know :) ) implements this filter.

Of course, blocking kiddie porn is a great thing to do - no-one can argue against this - but the danger here is that the filters net will not only be cast very wide, but also very deep and before people know it, all you will see on the net using conventional means will be material funneled into the country and out to the populace by the Ministry of Truth.

And then there's the issue of removing all responsibility from your population for self-regulation - the nanny state element. This of course follows logically after over 4 continuous decades of dumbing down, en masse, the world.

There is some stuff in the article that really scared me. It's like the original plan but much worse. much much worse

Senator Conroy says some internet content is simply not suitable in a civilised society.

This statement is incredibly ambiguous. The definition of what a civilised society is can be rather elastic. An executive decision is made to keep things the way they are and hide anything that is different or challenge moral values. This gets even more dangerous when you consider the next statement.

He says the Government will not determine what is blacklisted on the internet in Australia, rather an independent body will determine what sites are rated as RC for refused classification.

What. the. fuck. You mean our own democratically elected government which is by the people for the people will not be controlling what content society considers acceptable? What exactly would this 'independent body' be? The only supporters of such legislation I can think of are the catholic church and big business. In a demo-fucking-cratic society I do NOT want two very small, very vocal groups to be controlling what everybody else can see due to their organized influence on politicians. These groups want influence and power and by bending the definition of what 'civilized society' is, the government is essentially allowing these groups to block out groups that challenge their hegemonic ideologies.

Grants will also be offered to ISPs to voluntarily block other content.

Net Neutrality anyone? There is an epic debate going on in the US about this and now as part of this whole 'fuck you' scheme they are giving ISPs more control from customers. Think about it, they are legally allowed to block anything they want. YouTube? Nah, that's an extra $5 a month. BitTorrent? What BitTorrent. Oh damn the TV here is shit? Well stop complaining.

Along with the whole 'stop and search without a warrant' thing they've got going on in WA, Australia is going to be the next Thailand in a minute. Are we really in such a state of emergency that we need to be taking away every possible human right?

Seriously, the Greens, Socialist Party, CPA, PPA and Sex Party Au need to get their shit together right now for the next election. Because now that we have a douchebag who opposed no-fault divorce and anti-discrimination as the head of the Liberal Party, Australia is truly fucked when it comes to the next election.

Hysteric hyperbole, histrionics and exaggeration isn't going to help the cause of more rational Australians. It always irritates me when people conflate American constitutionalism and political history with Australian politics.

America's government is elected for the people, by the people. Gettysburg is in America.

Tony Abbot didn't oppose no fault divorce. No fault divorce became universal around twenty years before he was elected. He suggested that couples should have the ability to opt into a no-fault divorce arrangement prior to marriage. He never opposed any anti-discrimination legislation. The three main pieces of Federal anti discrimination legislation in Australia (the Sex, Disability and Racial Discrimination Acts) were all passed before he became an MP.

Big business is behind internet censorship? If censorship doesn't slow down the internet, I can't think of one reason why they'd care either way. If it does, I can think of one reason why they would. I'm sure the Catholic Church doesn't want child pornography censored, but for different reasons.

There is no Australian right to freedom of expression. The legislation isn't going to take away any rights.

All of the parties you listed except for the Greens have the electoral power of a small fart. None of them will be able to get any representatives up. The Greens recently ran Clive Hamilton, the father of the censorship policy in a federal by-election. Good luck.

Australia is a stable democracy. Thailand is a fragile democracy which is suffering from a Muslim insurgency, institutionalised corruption, AIDS and constant military coups. We aren't going to be anything like Thailand in the near future.

Internet censorship is a stupid policy. You seem reasonably intelligent. Next time you want to attack something like this, arm yourself with facts. It isn't hard to come up with a cogent argument against internet censorship.

I'm so sick of this - why is it that there isn't an IT person making these decisions?

I wonder what laws will be introduced regarding the filter circumvention. What someone should do is set up a few open proxies in NZ just to prove the point that the Govt aren't doing anything to stop people from accessing this material. Maybe they'll listen when all someone needs to do is type "bypass australian filtering" to find information on how to get around this shitty filtering system.

So pissed right now, they have no right screwing with our overpriced, underpowered internet as it is!

So pissed right now, they have no right screwing with our overpriced, underpowered internet as it is!

See, it's much easier to 'protect' the children from paedophiles than it is to fix the overpriced, underpowered internet.

People seldom demand improvements in something they are afraid of.
Popular support for better internet in Australia now is about as likely as popular support for better witches and Jews in Germany during the Middle Ages.

Only a tiny fraction of what the social conservatives deign 'unsuitable content' is transmitted over HTTP. /b/, for all its moral decay, has nothing on what one can even accidentally stumble across on limewire or other P2P networks. Yet it is 'web sites' that the legislators want to block.

For this reason, there is an enormous danger of this legistlation exhibiting mission creep. Given the absurd claim of "100% effectiveness", the independent body has a clear mandate not only to block sites that host inappropriate content, but also sites that will allow bypassing of the filter (http proxy tunnels such as ktunnel.com) or free vpns. Further, as the nature of eDonkey, limewire and other P2P architectures are such that fine individuation of content is impossible, their mandate - given the 100% stipulation - could be argued to include blocking the protocols altogether.

oh well, voting for whoever removes that blacklist come the next election.
anyway, conroy has raised an important point:
"No civilised society would allow this blablabla."
the point is, do we want to consider ourselves civilised? I mean, we have manners, general tolerance of everything under the sun (cronulla was beer, northern territory political screw-up) and a thriving set of open cultures from different backgrounds, largely free from fear and opression (though not prejudice, but nobody's perfect).
Why would we go and jeopardise that for the sake of appearing civilised? None of these things exist in a civilised country.
Just look at Britain. Or Italy! perfectly fine places until they caught civilisation. Now they're awkward remains of the hulks they were, the geopolitical equivalent of a doddering granddad who abused steroids as a kid.
Civilisation is a memetic disease, a nationalistic ideal taken too far to be of any use and extremely foolhardy to pursue. I say that, in order for australia to remain free-spirited, innovative and tolerant, it should avoid civilised behaviour as much as possible. In other words, it should nurture the future rather than the past.
This is why, minister conroy, your words are as dumb as your actions to me. I hope you and your stupidity are forgotten by time itself, as an act of pity for you and your descendants. None would bear the shame of strangling the australian way of life more than you, the civiliser of Australia, should your pitiful scheme ever see the light of day.

I don't mind human stupidity when it generally has no effect. But when the ignorant come to power and start spreading lies, this is when i get pissed. I cannot believe the stupidity of humanity. Fuck this shit, seriously Fuck this shit. I'm going to live in Europe. The internet is the one thing that allowed us to feel a sense of freedom. The last part of society that wasn't under the control of the government. The one thing that gave us the right to speak freely. Fuck this shit. Fuck Steven Conroy. Also i know I'm ranting, Fuck off if you don't like it.

I fought this legislation years ago when it was being proposed by Senator Harradine. I spoke at the EFA rally and raised public awareness of the issues. We stopped that legislation having any impact on the burgeoning internet, and it was good.

However, this time? Fuck it. Let them pass it. Everyone has been so apathetic about the fact that we're hanging out a flag as the least progressive nation (next to freaking China) wrt online issues. So fuck it. People can have the system they deserve, and hopefully once it's too late, they'll realise what they've wrought.

Then we have some hope of getting it turned around, and getting things back to normal. People's ability to see this as a problem in advance seems to be limited - so they'll just have to bring it in, and then we'll see if they care.

fuck you know, they are all like, 'there are just some things a civilized society shouldnt see'. that would be reasonable if child porn and other typically fringe things were all they were banning. but this guy is conservative. he is in the same boat as the people who censored lfd2 in this country. the blacklist will reflect that.
no i do not look up child porn i just dont trust you not to ban a whole lot of shit i do want to access later down the track. particularly since you wont release the blacklist
(keep your hands off wikileak)

Do you think it's coincidence that yesterday they ask for consultations on an R18+ rating for games and today they announce this? It's like they were buttering us up.

I have made my classification submission and tomorrow I will be calling my MP (Tony Zappia) and Stephen Conroy's office. No more armchair activism for me, it's time to actually talk to the people who are screwing up our country.

When K Rudd said he wanted closer relations with China I really didn't think he meant we would start adopting their policies. This is a bad way of hiding a problem rather than fixing it; it also introduces serious loop-holes to democratic freedoms... that the government will now take advantage of.. "grants" indeed.

Australia is now officially a Dictatorship country. We the people do not get a say in what we want to read or look at. Being controlled by the government is so NOT cool. Women don't get the same pay grade as men in this country. We don't have same sex marriage. We are going backwards down a hole!

Fail to blow up parliament in the attempt to usher in Catholic rule, get caught, tortured and executed and have effigies of of your traitorous self burned every year? Good plan, but I'm not sure what it will achieve...